In today's podcast episode we come to something difficult. What does it mean that God is holy? Previous podcasts looked at Bible texts that were virtually self-defining: that is, the words in the context of the sentence were easy to understand. The meaning of the text was unambiguous and clear. But when we come to the idea of the holiness of God we run into a little difficulty; that is because the Hebrew word qodesh and the equivalent Greek word hagios were transliterated into the English word holy. That English word is based upon words from the Old English, Proto Germanic, Old Norse, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon (among other European languages). The concept of holy in these European languages is sometimes at odds with or different from what the Bible means by holy.
In these situations, the Bible Bard is concerned to provide a little context to the bible verses that discuss a topic. When the Bible says that God is holy, it is considering God to be separate from humanity in an awesome sense, so much so that he is worthy of worship. In this episode we look at biblical texts that clarify the Bible's meaning of the concept of holiness.
